First of all a big apology for the lack of releases and updates over the last few weeks/months but things have got very complicated and busy (both at work and at home) so I just don't have the time to do much skin coding at the moment.

My time may be limited but I still want to get this skin up to scratch and in a bug-free state. In order to achieve this I'm going to have to call a feature freeze and concentrate on tidying up what bugs are in there.

Once all the bugs are squashed then I'll be able to get the v1.00 release out and get the skin code into the Official XBMC Skinning SVN.

I have managed to make a few changes in the limited time I've had recently but I haven't really had the time to test them all properly.

The main changes are as follows:

Added: Displaying of latest movies and episodes to Home screen

Added: Option to Hide Latest Videos on Home

Added: Music Playlist Editor screen

Added: Music Player Controls to Music Vis screen

Added: Russian translation (thanks to fat.hamster)

Added: Chinese translation (thanks to taxigps)

Added: Further 13 studio logos

Fixed: Navigating to cast list in video info dialogs

Fixed: Width of Director value in Episode Info dialog

Fixed: Runtime was overlapping the resolution and aspect flags

Fixed: Made sure that music info is hidden on music vis screen when lyrics is active

Updated: made text more readable by adding a darker shadow color

Updated: Widened area for clock on Video OSD (so it works better with larger fonts)

Updated: Fixed displaying of animated weather on home

Updated: Tidied up RSS display on home screen

Updated: Dutch translation (thanks to Waffa and mcage)

Updated: Portuguese translation (thanks to xbs08)

Updated: German translation (thanks to Haggy)

Updated: Italian translation (thanks to ZIOLele)

Updated: Swedish translation (thanks to blittan)

Updated: Italian translation (thanks to ZIOLele)

Updated: Spanish translation (thanks to Melandryu)

If you do find any bugs please post details (with screenshots if possible) and I'll look to get them all cleared up as quickly as I can.

Thanks again to everyone who has helped during the development of the skin and (time permitting) I'll be able to get back and add new features and improvements in the (not too distant) future.

Use Recent Version of XBMC
In order to get the best out of this release you need to be using a version of XBMC built in the in the week or so (since the changes to XBMC for media flags has only just been added). As yet the media flagging has not been added to a t3ch release so just use the most recent available.

If you do decide to use it without an up to date version of XBMC then you may find that you can't see any of the media flags and none of the backgrounds appear. You have been warned.

If you really have to run an old version (or you run PLEX which doesn't support the newer features that XBMC does) then have a look at this thread - Temporary Fixes for Older XBMC Builds

Background Images
The skin itself does not contain any real background images since most users will already have a set of background images that they like (for MediaStream and Aeon skins etc) and I assume most users will be using fanart for the Movies and TV Shows anyway.

I have a nice set of custom background images that I use and aim to provide download links so that users can use these if they want.

2) when OSD menu slides in or out when playing a video, you can see for a while movie/episode synopsis text overlapping navigation buttons. I've tried to capture it, but without success, it's very brief, yet annoying